Customer Reviews

Le Crime (Louis Morgan Mysteries)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

E. Jakubassa comments that Coyot's review "... is much more entertaining than this book, it seemsl" This is largely due to the fact that Coyote obviously spent far more time writing his review than he did reading the book. This is about the most superficial review I have ever read.

Now, I don't rate it as a great novel, but good enough for me to buy his sequel. Almost every page gave me something to think about; not always relevant to the story being told, but about modern society in two hemispheres and relationships. The relationships between Louis Morgon and his children, his old colleagues, his friends in France and the country he left for a new life in France.

Coyote missed almost everything that was relevant. His rant about a pivotal scene in which Louis walks in on his ex wife have sex with his ex-boss totally misses the point. His ex-boss has gone on to become the Secretary of State, and his only humiliating experience was this one, and it has eaten away at him for 20 years. It wasn't humiliation at being caught in the act; after all Louis had never cared for his wife and had left her anyway. He was humiliated because he had undermined and destroyed Louis's career in the State Department and yet Louis had witnessed his weakness.

Read the other reviews for the storyline. Also read the reviews posted for "A French Country Murder" which was the original title or better still, buy the book and experience something different to most crime/mystery novels

FYI: Le Crime is the 2008 paperback version of Peter Steiner's 2003 hardcover, A French Country Murder. Same book, different title.

Over twenty years ago Louis Morgon resigned in disgrace as a State Department liason with the CIA as an expert in middle east policy. Having divorced his wife he has spent the last twenty years living alone in Saint Leon sur Deme, a small village in France. When a dead body turns up on his doorstep one morning he is confronted with the fact that "the sordid world" as he likes to call his former life, has finally caught up with him. Louis intuitively knows that the dead body is a message meant solely for him. He begins to investigate and is soon collaborating with the local police constable to learn why he is being targeted. Along the way we learn what happened to Louis so many years ago and why anyone cares about him now.

So that's the crime and the vehicle the author uses to take us on a trip through rural France. Peter Steiner is a gifted writer that brings the sights, sounds, smells and day to day life of the French countryside to life. It is an idealic setting that contrasts starkly the cutthroat and corrupt world of Washington politics. In order to put the personal threat to him to rest Louis must return to his former life and confront enemies he never knew he had.

The prose is smooth and powerful. The story is both nostalgic and viloent. An unusual combination makes for a terrific story of political intigue and revenge in a beautiful setting.

I eagerly awaited this book after reading an interview of the author for his second book. I thought I should start at the beginning of what I hope will be a long series featuring Louis Morgon.

The writing is colorful with great descriptions of France as he walks through the country. Descriptions of food will make you wish you were there! The characters in the small town where Louis settles are a perfect cast of French citizens.

An enjoyable story all around. Amusing observations at the workings of the State Department and the CIA. It will make you think about airports in a different light!

Be careful this book though great comes in 2 titles and its the same book. Of course I managed to buy both unknowingly. The other title is something like Murder in an English Garden.The book is a great story as is his L"Assasine

I enjoyed this book, & will read more by the author. The scenes of French village life are appealing, as are the main characters; the plot is curious & well-constructed. My quibbles : the author betrays a certain anti-American snobbery (see the brief sarcastic & stereotypical scene with the racist American cab driver) and a lugubrious cynicism about government in general (very convenient for summer-escapist philosophy).

My main motive for writing this review, however, is to complain about the atrocious proofreading and typesetting of this book. Page after page of screwed-up typesetting and typos - pretty amazing from a major mainstream publishing house. The author must be mortified; this reader (& purchaser) feels ripped off.

The opening of "Le Crime" is so pleasant--one man's morning breakfast ritual at his home in the French countryside--and written with such assurance, I held out hope that an equally captivating journey would follow. And though author Peter Steiner lays a murder at our protagonist's feet posthaste, in true thriller fashion, the remainder of the book is a slow, tedious haul.

There are some very good things about this first novel, and some very bad things, too.

Good things include the cleverly named "Morgon" for the leading man, a misanthropic former CIA agent who moves to France after retirement to become "more gone," I presume. I also like Renard (French for fox, an appropriate if slightly coy choice), the local gendarme, whose wife is always cooking up something delicious.

Steiner obviously appreciates the beauty of Morgon's adopted land, another good thing, as well as French food (though honestly, who doesn't love French food?). And I have no objection to a novel-as-travelogue, since I am an unabashed armchair traveler (see: Paul Bowles, Paul Theroux, Helen Lawrenson, among others).

But I do object to Steiner's surface rambles. He has committed the fatal mistake common to so many beginning writers: fascination with the sound of his own words. When he led me through the back way out of Charles deGaulle Airport into a sleepy little village that traffic had bypassed, I was thrilled at the secret world he'd opened for me. (My husband and I plan, someday, to walk through Europe, beginning with France.) All too quickly, however, Steiner's gambol turns into a list of places, one town following another, with nothing unique about any of them. Granted, he does attempt to add zest to this thin potage (or portage), but the result only muddies the waters. For instance, he invents an ominous ditty that has no bearing on the story he is telling, and yet he continues to dredge up these inane verses, I can only presume, to fill a lack of action. He also conjures a weird encounter with a gypsy accordion player who goes by various names and seems both friendly and threatening, which, I suppose, is meant as a metaphor for the kinds of people Morgon once tangled with in his CIA days.

If I am reading a mystery/thriller, as this book is billed, I want to be thrilled or at least curious about the mystery. Sadly, I am only mystified. The denouement is so unsatisfying, I nearly threw the book across the room. They say revenge is best served cold, but Steiner's meal is tepid at best. If shame and humiliation are motives for revenge -- fair enough -- then give me a target eviscerated by shame and humiliation instead of the limp gotcha that is hard to swallow. To make matters worse, Steiner leads up to his "crise" by tossing in various characters (Ms. J. Dryer is one) that merely act as strange addenda. Are the meant to create tension? (they don't) or confusion? (they do).

Steiner would have been served, by a much better editor, to eradicate misplaced commas, that disrupt the pace, of so many sentences (see what I mean?). A good editor also would have pared down Steiner's self-absorbed ramblings about food, planets, stars, and pilgrimages leading nowhere. A good editor would never have allowed Steiner to cough up pithy quotes with phrases such as: "Was it Goethe who said..." or "I think Chekhov wrote..."

Particularly offensive is Steiner's use of the "camino" to Santiago de Campostela in Spain. His description of the famous pilgrimage comprises, again, a list of French towns, ending at the border of Spain. The remainder of the pilgrimage through the Pyrenees -- which pilgrims consider the most essential leg -- is wrapped up in a single, short phrase stating that Morgon reached Santiago. For Steiner, it seems, namedropping is the only essential required here.

My last beef verges on an accusation of plagiarism. In chapter 12, as Morgon is walking through France, he falls asleep outside. He wakes and regards the stars, their reflection in a nearby pond, his place in this dual universe. He notes an owl flying by. He continues to muse, and I begin to seethe. Steiner has evidently read Robert Louis Stevenson's classic journal, "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes," a beautifully written narrative describing a twelve-day sojourn Stevenson made in 1879. It is a masterpiece of transportage for any reader, and Steiner evidently thinks so too. Indeed, imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but Steiner's mockup of Stevenson's genuine article is truly shameful. And sure enough, about 50 pages later, the Cevennes pops up as one of the many place names Steiner liberally sprinkles, like so many breadcrumbs, from a crumbling, stale baguette.

What a fabulous premise - a retired american agent living in an idyllic french village has a body dumped on his doorstep. Any of the good crime writers out there - Fred Vargas, Martin Walker, Barry Eisler,etc. could have taken this ball and run with it. Instead, Mr. Steiner takes away all the elements that make crime novels in foreign settings so addictive; gone are the smells, the food, the unique ways of life, the feeling of actually 'being there'. Mr. Walker chooses, instead, to give us a running psychological expose of Louis Morgon's psyche and it brings the book to a grinding halt before it even gets started. Background is always necessary, but what could be said in one or two sentences is hashed out in page after boring page. Even the dialogue is unrealistic! This is the first time EVER I have reviewed a book and it is with true disappointment that I have to say that I put this down after getting halfway through it....it was that bad...I won't be buying the sequel.

A friend recommended Le Assassin by Peter Steiner, and in the process of putting that on hold I found that Le Crime was the first in the series. So to keep things straight, I decided to start at the beginning. Now, since my friend has not steered me wrong in recommendations so far, I *will* be reading Le Assassin. But if I were to judge it by Le Crime, I'd probably pass. Le Crime was a slow espionage novel, with most of the action taking place in the mind and not in the real world. I felt as if I had missed a major chunk of the story somewhere, and the whole book left me feeling a bit underwhelmed.

Louis Morgon is a former State Department official who has moved to France to escape his past. He was forced out of his position by rumors and accusations about his ability and decisions he made during critical world events, and now he just wants to put it all behind him. Unfortunately, the past comes back in a gruesome way when he finds a dead body on his doorstep, a man with his throat slit. The local French police captain is pressured to ignore the crime, but he and Morgon continue to dig a bit deeper into what may have led to this body showing up. Was it random or a warning to Morgon? Is it something from Morgon's past, or perhaps is it tied to current world events? Morgon has his ideas as to what it means and who is behind it, and starts to pick at mental and physical threads in hopes that those responsible will tip their hands and reveal themselves.

For me, the book was just far too slow with not enough action that I normally expect in an espionage story. A significant part of the book deals with flashbacks and ties to his children, how he neglected them growing up, and how his primary suspect ruined his life and career while appearing to be solidly supportive. And given that both the main characters are well past the age of 60, it's not as if there are thrilling action scenes and life-or-death physical struggles. Mostly the action takes place in the mind, and in this case, it wasn't enough to keep me overly involved. I'll give Le Assassin a chance following this, but there may be a few books between now and then, as I'm not feeling highly compelled to dive back into Morgon's world.

Disclosure:
Obtained From: Library
Payment: Borrowed

If you like lots of flashbacks interrupting the flow of the story , vivid descriptions of naked men, and scenes in which cripples get tortured, by all means, this is the book for you.

slight spoiler alert:
The descriptions of men lying naked in bed come with a few pages of each other. I've never read a book before that featured two such scenes in such short order. Of course, there may be a large body of literature out there in which this is commonplace, but it's not featured in the sections on Amazon that I frequent.

Of course, these aren't your garden variety Naked Man descriptions.
The first is of a man in his early 60's and dwells on his thickening middle, his wrinkles and his droops in all the wrong places , you get the idea. It's also a powerful scene within the context of this "story" as the character has exposed himself intentionally to a would be assassin (I didn't realize being a hired killer could be so unpleasant). Why does he choose to "entertain" an assassin in his hotel room lying stark naked with only his shriveled manhood to defend himself?
He's sending a message to the man who hired the assassin, you ninny! Why else? I know, there seem to be some holes in this logic. Par for course. Speaking of which, there are enough holes in this book to hold a PGA tournament on its pages.

The second description of a naked man involves a man who is not so much older as he is fat (describing fat people is a favorite occupation of this author). This is an especially humiliating moment, as the plump man is found naked by the husband of the woman he has just had sex with. I'm not sure if he's humiliated because of his chubbiness, or his having just had sex with the man's wife, but it is so humiliating that twenty years later, having become the Secretary of State of the United States of America, his is willing to risk his career and his life to even the score. Maybe nudity is a lot more horrifying than I ever knew. Or maybe the author of this book has...issues. In any case, after reading "Le Crime", I'm sure a lot of people will think twice before taking off their clothes.

There is also the crippled woman who gets tortured. She has the oddest disability, some sort of welding of the spine that leaves her terribly disfigured yet still able to walk, to dance and to have sex. I'm not exactly clear what's wrong with her, actually, except that she is "crippled". And also she's married to a fat man, of course. A different fat man than the naked one. I almost felt cheated that the author didn't describe this man in his birthday suit, though he did spent plenty of time on his massiveness. He loves fat people. The Hero manages to catch up with a lot of people from his past during the course of the book and the one thing they all have in common is that they've gained weight.

This is not a standard run of the mill suspense story. Unlike most mysteries, there aren't many suspects. There is really only one person who can possibly be behind everything and it turns out to be exactly that person who is behind everything. This is quite unusual for a book of this nature.
Also, in most books like this the climax is quite thrilling, and reaches a crescendo where the reader can't put it down. I didn't have that problem at all with this book. I didn't even have to put it down. It fell out of my hands as I drifted off to sleep, dreaming dreams of...better books (or at least more attractive nudes).